On March the 19th we shed our usual engineering style clothes and went home to get ready to celebrate Craig’s award shortlisting for Emerging Entrepreneur at the East Midlands Business Desk Leadership Awards. We’d booked a table, invited our very best business friends and enjoyed the evening immensely even though Craig did not come home with a trophy!
The award application background
Craig has been an employee of the company for 15 years; he started in a support role to provide the expertise that was missing in the business which was providing detailed design and manufacturing packs. The business needed Craig’s meticulous attention to detail, ability to translate CAD into the real world, his commercial understanding and project management skills. Client’s of the company soon came to rely on his support, his delivery and advice.
The Business Desk’s Emerging Entrepreneur award asked the following:
‘Are you an emerging entrepreneur who’s starting to make a real impact in the East Midlands business community? Do you have the ambition and vision that could take you on to achieve great things?
The East Midlands Leadership Awards 2026 wants to celebrate leaders who are at the exciting early stages of their entrepreneurial journey and are already demonstrating exceptional potential.’
We could answer yes to those questions for Craig now he is a 50% owner of Apexis Engineering.
Award entry
It’s widely recognised that it’s never easy to move from employee to business owner, Craig has made that move with a management buyout of the business. Over the last 14 years Craig’s self development has been immense to build on the role he had here within the business. Today he’s still an outstanding design engineer delivering world-class solutions to our clients on a daily basis but he’s moved from being the ‘intreprenuer’ supporting the business admin to building a business with a business partner.
In 2019 Craig set the plan for his aspirations to build a full service turnkey engineering business, COVID-19 hit and it was time to ensure the business could survive this storm so the plans were shelved.
By 2023, with a thriving design business where some manufacturing was undertaken, a management buy out was agreed; the first thing undertaken was finding a new home for the business in Derby. The business plan that was created during this time resurrected Craig’s aspirations and our new home was an industrial unit so we were able to fast track our business pivot and add on the new services in a meaningful and very real way.
Today our vision is alive; you can see that we are now a revived company who offer turnkey engineering services. Craig had the vision but wanted a business partner who believed in his plans and who could help build. Seleena began with the business in 2020 as a consultant and the rest as they say is history (she owns the other 50% of the business!).
Craig is an entrepreneur who is a reliable safe pair of hands; he’s not taking massive unknown risks, he always does his homework and he works every day to achieve the business result for the business and our clients.
So he’s a winner in our eyes!
